Vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth and templated growth of nanowires (NWs) form two of the most widely used approaches in the synthesis of nanowires, and convey very different and valuable advantages. VLS nanowire growth produces free-standing nanowires of extremely high quality—potentially single-crystalline, defect-free, and with a single unique growth direction which may isolate anisotropic properties (Wagner et al. Journal of Applied Physics 35: 2993 (1964); Wu et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 123: 3165 (2001); Lu et al. Nat. Mater. 6: 8411 (2007)). The disadvantage to VLS lies in constructing useful networks or devices from such high-quality components, since aligning them or arranging them in an ordered way with respect to each other is extrememly challenging (see, Emerging Research Materials, International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, 2013). Growing nanowires instead using a template conversely produces well-organized components, but dispersed in an array which has material limitations; the arrays produced by templating are typically have little to no control of the crystallography of the NW-template interface, and wires which are grown in templates are often polycrystalline (Zhang et al. Chem. Mat. 11: 1659 (1999); Sauer et al. J. Appl. Phys. 91: 3243 (2002); Sander et al. Adv. Mater. 14: 665 (2002); Shingubara et al. Journal of Nanoparticle Research 5: 17 (2003)). In both of these approaches much focus has been directed towards the quality and alignment of the NW components, yet similar control of the template crystallography is not attempted, with the result that the functional potential of the template material itself, as well as the NW-template interface is largely neglected. Since the NW-template interfacial area can be vast, and since the functionality of composite materials depends critically on the nature of the interface, this represents exciting unrealized potential.